The Christian religion had a somewhat slow start during the first few centuries of the Christian era. No one knew exactly what this new religion believed. Some of its followers believed that Jesus was a divinity on earth. Others held that he was a great prophet who taught high morals. Some worshiped Mother Mary. Some sought direct communication with the God on High through contemplation and prayer. Some believed that only the priest could intercede with the God on High, on behalf of the commoner. Christianity, however, had strength, vitality and growth, because women were welcome during the first few centuries of its existence.
The dominant religion in the Roman Empire, through the first few centuries, was Mithraism. Mithra was the God of Persian Kings. He was born from a virgin, on December 25. His virgin mother was fertilized by the God on High. As an adult, he made the lame to walk, the blind to see, raised people from the dead, and performed many miracles. He had an early death, and was placed in a tomb covered by a rock. When the rock was later rolled away, Mithra came back to life. He enjoyed a last supper with his twelve disciples before ascending into heaven. Christians, eager to compete, adopted this entire panoply of mythology, and gave it to their hero, Jesus, as is later described in the gospels of the New Testament. What was Mithraism and what was Christianity became muddy waters.
The Emperor Constantine, who attributed his success in battle to Christianity, had made Christianity a religion protected by the Roman Empire, beginning in 310 CE. Constantine, however, became disturbed that he could not tell the difference between Mithraism and Christianity, and reached the point when he could not tolerate this ambiguity any more. He ordered all 1800 of the bishops of the Christian church to convene in Nice, in 325 CE, and agree on what they believed. Only 318 bishops were able to attend. The discussions were often heated. In the end, those bishops most powerful and persuasive won the arguments. They established the Nicene Creed, creating a trinitarian deity consisting of a god in heaven, a god on earth (Jesus) and a holy spirit. They agreed that Jesus’ ascension into heaven should be celebrated on Easter. They adopted the male priest dominated format of Mithraism, to the exclusion of women priests. They were now a religion with an established story, an established creed, and carried the sanction of the Roman Empire. Then the cruelty began. Any time any religion is closely tied to and/or a part of the government, cruelty follows.
The first cruel act of the Christian religion was to obliterate Mithraism as a rival for the attention of Roman citizens. The Christian bishops and their forces raided the High Temple of Mithra, situated on the Vatican hill. They threw out the priests of Mithra, looted their treasures, and established their Pope, the keeper of the keys to the kingdom, at that site. They kept all the miracles of Mithra as their own, applying them to their hero, Jesus. That site is now known as the Vatican, the center of the Roman Catholic Church. It was a bold political power move, falsely justified in their minds by religious fervor, and bigotry directed toward all other religions. That bigotry and cruelty against other cultures and other religious beliefs has continued unabated throughout the centuries to follow.
The creators of the Christian church established a male dominated priesthood, insisting that those priests were married to the church, and therefore could not have sexual relations with any woman. This fallacious doctrine has had devastating cruel consequences over the centuries to follow. Sex is a normal part of human activity. If it is suppressed one way, it will find expression in some other way. The result of this misogynous doctrine has been a massive run of pedophilia within the priesthood of the Catholic Church over the centuries to follow. Millions of children have been abused over the centuries, robbed of normal human pleasures, the remainder of their lives cruelly distorted and twisted. The extent of this great social injustice has just recently been coming to light. It is time to stop. Allow priests to marry, express themselves as normal human beings. Allow women to become priests. Male domination and sexual perversion have no place in a nurturing, cooperative, respectful human society.
This Christian disdain for and cruelty directed toward other people who held other religious beliefs reached its peak with those series of crusades against the Holy Land, as well as Baltic, European and Eurasian countries, lasting from 1095 until 1410. Millions of men, women and children of other religious faiths were massacred at the hands of Christians, their villages looted and destroyed.
During the centuries to follow in Europe, priests and bishops of the Christian church aligned themselves with local, regional and national governments to cruelly consolidate their power and build their wealth. The inquisitions began. “Heretics” were falsely accused, falsely imprisoned, and their property stripped from them. Those who resisted were either hanged or burned at the stake. The result was the rise of a Catholic Church with great political, monetary and real estate power.
Probably the primary aim of the European colonization of Africa and the Americas was the accumulation of wealth, power, natural resources, and the treasures of those native lands. Close behind that impetus, however, was the drive to convert all those native populations to Christianity. Native cultures and languages were ignored. Those inhabitants of those other faraway lands were considered savages, who needed to be forced into a different language, religion and culture. Living in harmony with nature was ignored. Natives who did not convert to Christianity were punished or shunned.
In the United States of America, the Indian Civilization Fund Act of 1819 provided federal money to establish Protestant and Catholic boarding schools, to teach Native American children “the habits and arts of civilization.” In practical terms, that meant cultural eradication and forced religious conversion. Children were ripped from the arms of their parents, taken away from their extended tribal families, their education in hunting, fishing, horse husbandry and horsemanship, tracking, sewing, cooking, weaving, nurturing, crop management, living in harmony with their environment. Instead, these frightened children were jammed into overcrowded unsanitary dormitories where nutrition was poor, medical care absent, and as a result, high rates of measles and tuberculosis. Those children who resisted being taught Christianity or the English language were severely punished; corporal abuse and rape were common. Runaway rates and death rates were high. Large graveyards rapidly sprung up alongside these some 500 so called schools that were established in the United States and Canada. These were, in reality, torture chambers for children. It is estimated that 25,000 Native American children lost their lives during this Christian horror.
Those Native American children who survived this religious cruelty did not fare much better. They found themselves unable to fit back into their native tribes, unable to understand well their native language, void of the life skills they should have learned, lacking cultural and ceremonial knowledge. They found themselves shunned by their own people. Those survivors of this Christian horror who went to the cities also found themselves shunned as outsiders. They were denied work, housing, loans, voting rights and citizenship. Many became alcoholic and homeless. This travesty of justice did not end until 1969, when those boarding schools were closed by the Johnson administration.
After the World Trade Center attacks in 2001, President George W. Bush was in anguish. He had to formulate a response to those devastating murders and destruction that would show determination, strength and purpose. He turned to his Christian religion to give him the reasons for his actions to follow: the invasions of Afghanistan, and then Iraq. In his distorted Christian mind, it became a Good versus Evil battle. It was good Christians against a Muslim “axis of evil.” Muslims countered with their own version of this good versus evil battle. It’s the good Muslims against the “Great Satan” of America. The end result of this Christian and Muslim combined cruelty has been the loss of some three million human lives, immense suffering, and the destruction of civilized societies.
Christian cruelty continues up to our present time. On January 6, 2022, conservative Christians joined forces with white supremacists, neo-nazis and military separatists, to commit treason against the United States of America. Incited by their charismatic, pathologic leader, Donald John Trump, they stormed the capitol building of our country, violently disrupting the orderly business of our national congress. Their intent was to hang the vice-president of our country, and seize the electoral results of our free and fair presidential election. Their direct desire was to subvert those election results, denying the will of the people, destroying our democracy, performing a coup to place a pathologic dictator as the head of our government.
Christian conservatives have combined with white supremacists to avidly promote voucher programs for our schools, robbing our public school systems of money needed for the education of our children. It is a poorly veiled attempt to re-establish segregation in our public school system, for the purposes of religious indoctrination and racism. Christian conservatives on school boards have vigorously pursued book bans, intent on preventing our children from learning freedom of expression, intent on teaching our children religious mythology as fact, rather than rational scientific facts. Christian conservatives on the campaign trail shout that the church should tell the government what to do, not the other way around, because this country was founded as a Christian nation. The truth is the exact opposite. Our founding fathers unanimously expressed their explicit and firm belief that democracy could not survive without the complete separation of church and state. In multiple states, Christian conservatives and white supremacists have passed more stringent voting laws, intent on subverting the will of the people, intent on destroying democracy.
There is an avenue Christians can take, if they choose to turn away from this centuries long history of violent cruelty. They can follow the primary teaching of their prophet, who told them to do unto others, as you would have them do unto you. They can express deep respect for their near neighbor, their far neighbor, and their enemies, who are, in today’s world, also neighbors. That will lead Christians to provide equal opportunity for all their neighbors to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. Otherwise, if they continue to accept the intolerant superiority mythology of their religion blindly as fact, Christian cruelty will continue to plague the human species.